After many years
of fruitless and frustrating research, TIGHAR has finally pinned down
the details of an elusive World Two accident. The crash of an airplane
on Sydney Island in the Phoenix Group is of interest to us primarily because
of its possible implications in our investigation of another aviation
loss that occurred in that same region of the Central Pacific six years
earlier. We’ve found scraps of aircraft wreckage in the abandoned village
on the island of Nikumaroro, an atoll about 200 miles west of Sydney.
Is it just wartime debris or could some of the pieces be from Amelia Earhart’s
Lockheed Electra? Part numbers are in short supply and much of the recovered
material is difficult to identify conclusively as to the type of aircraft
it came from. To make an educated assessment of what we’ve found it’s
important that we document the possibilities.

Contrary to popular
assumption, all Pacific islands are not littered with trash from World
War Two. Certainly the archipelagos which saw major battles – the Gilberts,
the Carolines, the Marshalls, the Solomons, etc. – are still haunted by
the steel and aluminum ghosts of those events, but islands that were always
beyond the combat zone have only the hulks of rear-area installations,
shipwrecks and the occasional aviation accident to remind them of the
bad old days. Fortunately for us, the eight islands of the Phoenix Group
fall into this latter category.

Canton (now Kanton)
had an airfield and was a major steppingstone in a transpacific air route
which stretched from California, to Hawaii, to Christmas or Palmyra, to
Canton, to Funafuti or Fiji and on into the Southwest Pacific Theater
of Operations. Three other islands of the group-Sydney (now Manra), Hull
(now Orona) and Gardner (now Nikumaroro) had small civilian populations
of Gilbert Islanders settled there by the British in 1939 to raise coconuts.
The remaining islands – Phoenix, McKean, Enderbury and Birnie – were
and are barren, uninhabited wastelands.

There were accidents
at Canton and aircraft disappeared at sea on the way to and from there,
but in only one known instance – the crash at Sydney Island – did
an airplane go down on one of the other atolls of the group. No loss of
Japanese aircraft on any of the islands was reported and an unreported
loss seems highly improbable. A flight from the closest Japanese base,
the airfield at Betio on Tarawa, meant a round trip of nearly 2,000 nautical
miles. It was done once. Early in 1943 a bombing raid caused minimal damage
on Canton with no losses to the attacking force. Tarawa fell to U.S. amphibious
forces later that year. In 1944, Gardner became the site of a 25-man U.S.
Coast Guard Loran navigation station resupplied periodically by a PBY
flying boat from Canton. Records of those flights show that no accidents
occurred. In short, the possible sources for aircraft wreckage found on
Gardner (Nikumaroro) are few.

The crash on Sydney
Island is of special interest to us because the Gilbertese settlers there
were said to have used the wartime wreck as a source of aluminum. In the
years after the war some of the Sydney residents came to live on Nikumaroro
and it seems likely that they may have brought pieces of wreckage with
them as raw material. Understanding just what happened on Sydney might
help us better understand what we’ve found on Niku and either eliminate
or further substantiate the artifacts suspected of being from the Earhart
aircraft.

But pinning down
the details of the Sydney crash proved to very difficult. A search of
all the usual, and many unusual, sources for accident reports turned up
nothing. Rumor held that it was a “large, four-engined aircraft from Canton,”
and because some of the parts found on Nikumaroro appeared to be from
a Consolidated B-24 we began to suspect that the airplane had been a Liberator.
Earlier this year, we obtained photos of wreckage seen on Sydney in 1971.
They showed two 14-cylinder, twin-row radial engines such as those used
on the B-24 and our suspicions were strengthened, but nowhere could we
find a B-24 loss which might be the Sydney crash. Then this week a TIGHAR
researcher stumbled upon the official U.S. Army Air Force accident file
which tells the story. It is tragic, poignant, and different than we expected.

It was only one among
the thousands of airplanes that struck the ground with unspeakable violence
in 1943. They were only nine among the millions of young lives that ended
suddenly and unnaturally that year, but perhaps because we have sought
the facts about their death for so long, their end-as revealed in the
dry tones of the official reports-seems real and very personal.

It was late November
1943 when Second Lt. William Prater, USAAF and his crew arrived at Canton
Island in C-47A-60DL serial number 43-30739 enroute to their first combat
assignment in Toatouta, New Caledonia. The airplane, Douglas constructor’s
number (c/n) 13890, had come off the Long Beach assembly line for delivery
to the Army on October 5th. Bill had gotten his wings the previous May
and had less than 100 hours in type when he picked up his crew, Second
Lt. John Barcharik, co-pilot; Second Lt. Morris Steinberg, navigator;
and Sgt. Malcom Willson, radio operator, on November 15th. On November
24th they had set off across the Pacific Ocean in an airplane that was
as new and as green as they were.

Although Canton was
supposed to be only a refueling stop on the long haul to the Southwest
Pacific, somewhere along the way Prater had taxied into a guy wire and
damaged the ship’s right wing tip. They were stuck on Canton until it
could be fixed. About a thousand miles off to the northwest, the bloody
Tarawa landings and the re-taking of the Gilbert Islands had just been
completed. Canton had played a major role as a staging area and the repair
facilities were undoubtedly busy with business from that action. It was
weeks before Prater’s wingtip was tended to. There wasn’t much to do on
the hot, barren atoll. Pilots were allowed to take their aircraft out
on local flights with little formality and jaunts to Hull or Sydney Islands,
which were said to be interesting to look at, were not uncommon. Two civilian
USO entertainers-Bob Ripa and Bobby Del Rio-were equally bored and shared
quarters with the various transient crews. On at least one occasion the
two entertainers had gone along on a sight-seeing hop even though, as
civilians, their participation on such flights was against regulations.

By the afternoon
of December 17, 1943 the C-47 had finally been fixed and signed off as
airworthy. Boredom, rather than the coincidence that it was forty years
to the day since the Wright brothers’ first flight, was the likely reason
for Bill Prater and John Barcharik’s decision to take a ride down to see
Sydney Island. Morris Steinberg, the navigator, was up for it and they
found several other guys who wanted to go along. The radio operator, Sgt.
Willson, decided to let the officers have their fun without him. Bob Ripa
and Bobby Del Rio were alone in the barracks shack reading, stripped own
to their shorts in the heat, when Barcharik stopped by in a jeep and asked
if they were ready to go. Del Rio wanted to finish his book and declined.
Ripa hesitated for a bit but then decided to join the others. Bobby thought
it was odd that his friend should accept because he and Ripa had just
been on such a flight a few days before. Neither had any idea that they
had just made life or death decisions.

To get around the
regulations, Bob Ripa was listed on the manifest by his real name, Edvin
Hansen. Second Lt. Ed Hall, the Assistant Operations Officer who approved
the flight, assumed that this Hansen guy was an Army private. He knew
that the only civilians on the base were Ripa and Del Rio. Around 3 p.m.
Prater, Barcharik, Steinberg, Hansen, another 2Lt. named George Gee, and
four Sgts-nine men in all-took off in 30739 and headed south for Sydney,
about an hour’s flight away.

The only first hand
account of what happened next was later provided by the Native Magistrate
of Sydney Island:

The plane was
crashed on land. Flew around the island more than four times. At last
during the time flying it slide wheel down and flew off at a distance
of not more than a mile and then return perhaps ten or twenty feet
above sea level. When reached above there be fit [sic] flew up of
all a sudden it bumped the palm with right wing. During that time
the plane get in fire and at the last the body fell down beyond the
Maneaba [meeting house]. All the crew found dead except one of the
lot get breath not fifteen minutes later, then died again.

From this it would
seem that the plane may have been attempting to land, but the accident
report by Major W. C. Cotner, Commanding Officer of the Air Transport
Command unit at Canton, paints a more complex picture. Cotner inspected
the site the next day and wrote:

It was found
that the right wing had clipped a tree, outside of the motor, at the
beach while coming in low from the water. ... The right wing struck
a tree breaking the tree off about thirty feet from the ground. The
ship must have been in a right bank or there would have been other
trees damaged in this vicinity as there was not enough room for a
ship to come in between the trees. A portion of the right wing was
found approximately 86 feet inland. The plane went up over the trees
for a distance of about 150 yards and started coming down through
the trees again, shearing off the trees until it came to rest approximately
376 yards from the first tree which was struck. The motors continued
on after the plane came to rest, one for 46 yards and the other 63
yards from the plane. The airplane burned completely with the exception
of the tail section and the left wing from the motor out, and the
right wing which had been lost. The right elevator showed evidence
of the plane having been scraped along the ground on the right side.
The wheels were retracted and that the throttles and controls were
in full flight or cruising position. All evidence indicates that the
pilot came in in a right bank, struck the tree, careened on over the
village and other trees and finally hit ground with all power on.
Both propellers were badly bent and broken off. One occupant was said
to have been thrown clear of the plane but died a few minutes later.
The remaining eight were said to have been found in the plane after
the fire. The natives stated that the plane made several circles over
the island and kept coming lower and lower and finally came in over
the water quite low just before the crash occurred.

The Gilbertese wrapped
the bodies in white sheets and covered them with woven mats in graves
six feet deep. The next day an Army Air Force investigation team exhumed
and recovered the bodies. Maj. Cotner put the cause of the accident to
“low flying.” A review board later found that “it appears that
the pilot may have been attempting a forced landing.” Whether Bill Prater
simply smacked a tree while pulling a buzz job or had an inflight emergency
and failed in a desperate attempt to land his airplane will never be known
for sure. What is certain is that ten tons of Douglas workmanship and
the lives of nine young men came to a fiery end on an otherwise tranquil
Pacific island on an afternoon 55 years ago. It seems likely that relics
of that tragedy eventually made their way to Nikumaroro and are among
the artifacts collected by TIGHAR. It is also the case that knowing what
airplane crashed on Sydney Island may allow us to eliminate yet another
alternative explanation for recovered objects which we suspect are from
a much more famous, but no less tragic, loss.

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